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Paranoid Conspiracism and the Right

After the Alaska Green Party held its convention in March 1992 in Fairbanks,
the newly-elected chair, Ronnie Rosenberg, began to poke around. She
wanted to figure out what was behind several convention resolutions with
unusually idiosyncratic themes and why individuals who clearly had their
own peculiar agendas were showing up at Green Party meetings. She discovered
the Greens had attracted a new constituency. "These people were
clearly not from the progressive movement, and some didn't even know
what was in our party platform," says Rosenberg. "They were
against big government and distrustful of bureaucracy and authority,
and they clearly wanted to build alliances with us."

What most concerned Rosenberg was that some of the would-be Greens who
seemed wound up in their own conspiracy theories might be involved with
Far Right groups.

" We want to give people a fair hearing and we don't want to close
ourselves off from sincere new members since we do want to build coalitions," says
Rosenberg," but we don't want to be used as a vehicle for some hidden
right-wing agenda." Rosenberg, active with the Tanana-Yukon Greens,
wants to be sure that sincere people don't get co-opted." I guess
we just have to keep our eyes open," she says.

There are many individuals around the country promoting unsubstantiated
and often paranoid conspiracy theories in publications, lectures and
radio talk show interviews. While some of these conspiracy theories are
very attractive on the surface, and are undeniably entertaining, they
ultimately serve to distract people from serious analysis and crowd out
serious discussion of government misconduct, covert action, foreign policy,
and civil liberties. It doesn't matter if the source is sincere, psychotic,
sensationalist, or sent with disinformation by sinister souls to sink
the story, the result is that careful and arduous investigations into
a story are undermined as each element of an elaborate conspiracy theory
is disproven.

There certainly are real conspiracies in history, and the U.S. political
scene has been littered during the past thirty years with examples of
illegal political and government operations ranging from Watergate to
Iran Contragate, and from the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)
to the systematic looting of the savings and loan industry. Separating
real conspiracies from the fictional, non-rational, lunatic, or deliberately
fabricated variety is the problem faced by serious researchers, activists,
and journalists. In this paper the term conspiracy theorist refers to
someone whose analysis of documents, statements, and other evidence has
become uncoupled from a logical train of thought.

Dubious conspiracism has become widely accepted on the left, with large
audiences mesmerized by endless tales of intrigue broadcast on progressive
and alternative radio stations. For a time, stations on the Pacifica
radio network, especially FM stations KPFA, KPFK and WBAI, were a major
source of conspiratorial analysis for the left, although internal discussions
within the network prompted some reforms.

Scores of small FM stations play tapes by or air interviews with a cast
of conspiracy-mongering characters including John Judge, David Emory,
Sherman Skolnick, Bo Gritz, and Craig Hulet (aka K.C. Depass). These "experts" weave
webs so intricate they make a Hitchcock plot seem like a script for Mr.
Rogers: cures for AIDS and cancer are intentionally being suppressed
by a government/media plot; Naval Intelligence secretly controls the
U.S.; the CIA arranged the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas confrontation.

Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories peddled by questionable sources
have infected some major stories, and can be found to varying degrees
in the story of an alleged "October Surprise" , the Christic
Institute's "Secret Team" theory, the late writer Danny Casolaro's "Octopus" theory,
some versions of the Iran-Contra scandal, the savings and loan debacle,
BCCI, the search for POWs and MIAs, the Drug War, AIDS, the apparent
theft of Promis software, covert action, and CIA secret machinations.

It is important to note that the audience for the Pacifica network and
progressive radio stations is dwarfed by the audience for right-wing
radio programs that promote conspiracism. A surprising number of conspiracy
mongers, whether or not they self-identify as right wing, are peddling
variations on long-standing paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories in
which sinister global elites secretly manipulate world events. While
some information circulated by the far right may be factual, other material
can be unsubstantiated rumors or lunatic conspiracy theories. Some material
is bigoted and embodies racist or anti-Jewish theories. Paranoid conspiracy
theories of secret control have been promulgated for decades by the far
right in the U.S., and were analyzed by historian Richard Hofstadter
in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics.10 "The
central preconception of the paranoid style," wrote Hofstadter,
is the belief in "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally
effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate
acts of the most fiendish character."

Political movements with paranoid conspiracist theories have garnished
the American political scene since the Salem Witch Trials and the anti-Masonic
hysteria in the 1700's. Adherents of these conspiracy theories remain
a small isolated minority except during times of economic or social stress
when a mass following develops to blame selected scapegoats for the problems
besetting the society.

In paranoid political philosophies, the world is divided into us and
them. Evil conspirators control world events. A special few have been
given the knowledge of this massive conspiracy and it is their solemn
duty to spread the alarm across the land.

Conspiracism and scapegoating go hand-in-hand, and both are key ingredients
of the fascist phenomenon. Fascism is difficult to define succinctly.
As Roger Scruton observes in "A Dictionary of Political Tought," fascism
is "An amalgam of disparate conceptions."12

[Fascism is] more notable as a political phenomenon on which diverse
intellectual influences converge than as a distinct idea; as political
phenomenon, one of its most remarkable features has been the ability
to win massive popular support for ideas that are expressly anti-egalitarian.

Fascism is characterised by the following features (not all of which
need be present in any of its recognized instances): nationalism; hostility
to democracy, to egalitarianism, and to the values of the enlightenment;
the cult of the leader, and admiration for his special qualities; a
respect for collective organization, and a love of the symbols associated
with it, such as uniforms, parades and army discipline.

The ultimate doctrine contains little that is specific, beyond an
appeal to energy, and action.

Another way to look at fascism is as a movement of extreme racial or
cultural nationalism, combined with economic corporatism and authoritarian
autocracy; masked during its rise to state power by pseudo-radical populist
appeals to overthrow a conspiratorial elitist regime; spurred by a strong
charismatic leader whose reactionary ideas are said to organically express
the will of the masses who are urged to engage in a heroic collective
effort to attain a metaphysical goal against the machinations of a scapegoated
demonized adversary.

In any case, in most definitions of fascism the themes of conspiracism
and a targetted scapegoat emerge.

One of the most loathsome denizens of the racist far right is lecturer
Eustace Mullins. Mullins' tours are promoted in ads placed in the Spotlight.
In his pamphlet The Secret Holocaust, Mullins asserts:

The record shows that only Christians have been victims of the historic
massacres. The Jews, when they did not do the killings themselves,
as they always prefer to do, were always in the background as the only
instigators of these crimes against humanity. We can and we must protect
ourselves against the bloodthirsty bestiality of the Jew by every possible
means, and we must be aware that the Christian creed of love and mercy
can be overshadowed by the Jewish obsession that all non Jews are animals
to be killed.13

Mullins is best known as a critic of the Federal Reserve system, and
in public appearances he avoids anti-Jewish rhetoric. His work was briefly
promoted by Chuck Harder's "For the People" radio talk show
program and a related newspaper. Harder pursues right-wing conspiracist
themes, while scheduling a wide range of guests including consumer advocate
Ralph Nader. Harder's program is aired by more than 140 AM and FM stations,
and also on short wave and satellite frequencies.

The Sun Radio Network, essentially owned by Liberty Lobby, carried a
popular daily program that churns the conspiracies "du jour" :
Tom Valentine's "Radio Free America" . Midwest bureau chief
for "Spotlight" , Valentine is a member of the advisory board
of Liberty Lobby's Populist Action Committee. According to Shelly Shapiro,
director of Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice, the
Sun Radio Network is one of the most significant sources of anti-Jewish
and pro-fascist propaganda in the U.S.

Radio programs such as Harder's and Valentine's launder the views of
their right-wing guests to sound more reasonable to a broad audience.
Listeners can pursue the topic by writing or calling the guests and asking
for more information, with phone numbers and addresses handily provided
by the talk show host. In this way listeners can be introduced to the
more virulently racist and anti-Jewish material through the mail. No
matter where the right-wing conspiracy theories emerge, their roots trace
back to a handful of groups or movements on the right. In recent years
the four main centers of paranoid conspiracism and scapegoating on the
right have been the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, the LaRouchians,
and the movement known as the New Right.